EcoDistrit Summit Recap: will it pencil out?

This week I attended the EcoDistricts Summit Tuesday and Wednesday of this week and I can’t tell you how many times I heard the phrase “it may be a good idea but will it pencil out.”  Coincidentally this week’s BGI topics centered on the bottom line and the metrics we use to evaluate a successful business’s bottom line. The EcoDistrict Summit experience has definitely  renewed my desire to not only understand personally the metrics for a projects or business financial success but also to continue to empower others to learn these tools and use to use them for good! The next paragraphs are a brief recap of the EcoDistricts Summit in context of the bottom line.

While I haven’t personally attended a lot of conferences I felt this one was pretty good. There was a diverse global representation of people, an engaging keynote speaker, a wide variety of professionals, and a pretty good diversity of topics and issues addressed in the breakout sessions. The Summit’s one weakness is the broad overarching topic itself: EcoDistrict but I’m not sure that can be helped.

EcoDistrict is loosely defined as an area that is more than one building but not more than a city sharing resources in the collective pursuit of sustainability. You can immediately see how this gets messy.  Sustainability is a complex idea; it is more than just protecting our natural resources it also includes fostering social equity and financial security for all.  On a building scale the ideas of sustainability are more focused on the environmental footprint of that building; example metrics/certifications include Living Building Challenge, LEED, Evergreen Standards, etc.  But when you move to the neighborhood scale a collection of LEED buildings does not automatically make a neighborhood sustainable.  We can all agree that if a neighborhood has social inequalities and financial disparities it is not sustainable.  The good news our human brain is capable of dealing with complex ideas and issues. This one is no different.  As I ranted about in my blog las week complex messy problems are the spark of innovation!

“Fix the cities fix the world.” This is maybe my favorite quote of the weekend. It represents this idea that if we can make changes for good in our own communities we make changes for good in our nation and our world.  We have to remember there is no cookie cutter option that can be applied to every city or every neighborhood. Each ‘district’ has to come up with what works for them socially, financially, and environmentally. At the summit we learned about some great Swedish examples of EcoDistricts planning and implementation.  Malmo’s Wester Harbour is one of their shining examples (http://www.malmo.se/English/Western-Harbour.html).  One fact I think is worth passing along is that Sweden has continued to increase their Gross National Product while reducing Carbon Emission. They've learned lessons and improved their technology and now share it through their special Swedish Sustainable brand SymbioCity (http://www.symbiocity.org/en/). It is both informative and inspiring, and I recommend checking it out.  But again, the big take away from their presentation is this is not a ‘plug and play’ way to build a sustainable neighborhood. Sweden has much higher energy prices and is an important trigger point to spur developers towards high energy efficiency. In the U.S. we need to get creative and find different triggers.  We need to find triggers that get us to the place where the bottom line still ‘pencils out.’ My opinion our trigger may be valuing the human and environmental capitol in the bottom line. If human and environmental capitol are valued upfront as investments in the project those investments will pay off later with financial rewards. But a few individuals need to think outside the box and take a few risk to prove to everyone this kind of bottom line thinking will pay off.

The keynote speaker at the conference Carol Colletta, executive director of ArtSpace, talked about place making. The top three things she listed that create place for people are (1) the social fabric, (2) the aesthetics of the place, and (3) it’s distinctiveness.  I want to take a moment to expand on her third point as it was a topic that came up a lot at the conference as a way to engage the community. Example after example project success depended on citizen involvement. Citizens felt more engaged when they had a sense of place and that sense of place was derived from something distinctive about their collective neighborhood.  One example given was a web platform that citizens could engage public agencies by posting what they thought should be done to enhance the city in different location. When the city acted on one of the unique ideas by adding a spray park to a neighborhood park it instantly became a place of pride for the neighborhood. It then spurred even more citizen involvement, continued funding and innovation in the neighborhood.

I was struck at the conference by a few participants who are still hoping for the magic bullet that will make their idea reality. This magic bullet is often either some public or private grant money. This type of waiting around hoping for funding is a function of the grantor/grantee system. It is not an empowering way to think about creating change. A great example of creating change that is not grant dependent is ioby.com. The co- founder of ioby.com, Erin Barnes, spoke at the conference and she shared some great examples of small demonstrative projects that got citizens excited about change and used crowd sources as a tool to start the momentum. I won’t go into examples here but again check it out (ioby.com) along with this great pdf guide about Tactical Urbanism (http://issuu.com/streetplanscollaborative/docs/tactical_urbanism_vol_2_final?mode=window&backgroundColor=%23222222). These are both powerful tools to get beyond the doom and gloom of ‘we have no funding, so I can’t make a change.’ Start small, demonstrate, and make a case for your idea by showing people exactly what is so awesome about your project!

Another speaker at the forum was Mark Edlen of Gerding Edlen, a Portland based developer company. Mr. Edlen said the formation of his company was based in his own personal ethic not about the profit.  In fact many of the decision his company has made over the years went against conventional wisdom but years after those decision were made they are considered the new standards. Today Gerding Edlen is a successful development company that is asked to participate in projects across the nation. I think this is a great example of the benefits Bob Willard talked about in his book The New Sustainability Advantage. It’s a company that is not only profitable because it manages risks, invests wisely but because its foundation is rooted in sustainable culture; their tag line is People-Prosperity-Planet.  As a private property developer they are truly benefiting from their sustainable advantage in all 7 of the advantages Willard addresses: (1) increased revenue and market share, (2) reduced energy expenses, (3) reduced waste expenses, (4) reduced material and water expenses, (5) increased employee productivity, (6) reduced hiring and attrition expenses, and (7) reduced risk.  I think Gerding Edlen is a great example of several innovative thinkers with passion and ethics  made it ‘pencil out.’

I think too often the saying ‘it just won’t pencil out’ is a cop out. It’s a way of saying, yes, that is a brilliant idea, but it is too hard to think about ways to make it happen.  Often as individual or communities groups with great ideas we can be talked out of our idea by someone the bank, grantor, financial consultant simply saying ‘it won’t pencil out.’ This is why we all need to take control over our own knowledge. If we have a basic understanding of bottom line metrics we can challenge the experts by pointing out non-traditional revenue streams and sustainable savings helping them realize that our brilliant idea will ‘totally pencil out!’